SVG animation elements were developed in collaboration with the W3C Synchronized Multimedia Working Group, developers of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. The SYMM Working Group, in collaboration with the SVG Working Group, has authored the SMIL Animation specification, which represents a general-purpose XML animation feature set. SVG incorporates the animation features defined in the SMIL Animation specification and provides some SVG specific extensions.

The SVG can be embedded into HTML with the <img> tag element. By using the src attribute in the image tag it is possible to refer to an SVG file. This only works sometimes and not compatible for old browsers.

The most common solution is to use the <object> element, with the data attribute referencing the SVG file. When a browser does not support this, it falls back to the content inside the <object>. This could be a rasterized fallback <img>. This method gives a vector image with an alternative rasterized image for browsers that don’t support SVG.

The downside is that both formats need to be managed, and some browsers will download both the SVG and the rasterized version, becoming a performance problem.

Using inline SVG combined with an SVG <image> element solve the performance problem. This has an SVG href pointing to the vector SVG representation and a src attribute to the rasterized version. Older browsers will rewrite the <image> element as <img> and use the rasterized src attribute, but modern browsers will show the vector SVG.

There are some tools like Google Swiffy which can convert SWF, including Flash animations to SVG animations. Swiffy uses Javascript to animate the SVGs it produces, which are not stored as such on disk, but serialized as JSON.

This specifies that the value of ‘attributeName’ is the name of an XML attribute defined in the default XML namespace for the target element. The attribute must be defined as animatable in this specification.

auto

The default value is 'auto'. The implementation should match the ‘attribute Name’ to an attribute for the target element. The implementation must first search through the list of CSS properties for a matching property name, and if none is found, search the default XML namespace for the element.

Note: MediaWiki automatically generates static, non-animated thumbnails of SVG images. Viewing the actual .svg image from each respective description page will show its animation in a compatible browser.